I was recently talking to Notch in a TF2 livestream and asked him about his future aspirations of 0x10c. Although he seemed in a bad mood, he said: "Nope, their are no future aspirations for 0x10c. I'm going to make small games for the rest of my life. If someone on the office wants to carry it on they can." Well, at least now we have the final word from Notch. I thought it was just on ice, I'm very disappointed.

I don't envy Notch. Minecraft's success is virtually impossible to top, and no matter how awesome and perfect 0x10c would have been, it would have always been compared unfavourably to Minecraft. He could not have won here.

Continuation efforts are already under way, but I'm not keeping my hopes up. In the meantime, there's rymdkapsel for a very watered down (but awesome!) mobile experience, and there's Starmade for those who want Minecraft in space.

I think actually that it was a bit more like you could program the computer to perform functions, though you might use that to perform the scenario you describe. The CPU would mostly run the day-to-day of your ship, automating things -- your average sysadmin would be right at home. You could also program it to do other things -- scan for planets at longer ranges and log them to visit, for instance. The game was reportedly persistent, and the ships program would continue to run even while the player is logged off.